High Arctic may hold clues about potential life on Jupiter moon

Located 600 million kilometres from Earth and smaller than our planet's moon, Europa has been described by NASA as being "near the top of the short list of places in our solar system that might harbour extraterrestrial life."

Photograph by: Archive
, Calgary Herald

The Canadian Arctic's out-of-this-world strangeness is once again helping space scientists plan their search for extraterrestrial life.

A yellowish, sulphur-stained patch of ice and snow on Ellesmere Island — a unique physical feature that's been studied for years by NASA researchers and other experts — has now produced a potential test for telltale "biosignatures" for a future probe to one of the moons of Jupiter: ice-encased Europa, one of the galaxy's top candidates for the discovery of life beyond Earth.

Located 600 million kilometres from Earth and smaller than our planet's moon, Europa has been described by NASA as being "near the top of the short list of places in our solar system that might harbour extraterrestrial life."

Scientists believe Europa's icy crust might be covering a sea of liquid water that could sustain alien organisms, and they consider the bizarre phenomenon on Nunavut's Borup Fiord Pass to be a potential analogue for biological activity that might be happening on Jupiter's mysterious moon.

Ellesmere Island's yellow stain is known to be caused by an exceedingly rare geochemical reaction between the sulphurous minerals welling up from below a glacier and the cold-loving bacteria present on Canada's northernmost land mass.

In 2010, a Canada-U.S. research team discovered that the coloured ice can be pinpointed by infrared sensors housed in an orbiting spacecraft. Detailed in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, that study showed how detection devices aboard NASA's EO-1 Earth Observing satellite were able to filter images to isolate the unusual chemical activity happening at Borup Fiord's sulphur spring.

Then, last year, another international team of researchers identified the species of micro-organism — marinobacter — that's key to the coloration.

That discovery led the same group of researchers, including Geological Survey of Canada scientist Steve Grasby and Damhnait Gleeson — a former NASA astrobiologist now working at the Centro de Astrobiolgia in Spain — to investigate whether detailed evidence of biological activity could be produced at Borup Fiord using infrared spectroscopy and other techniques.

They discovered it could be done and detailed their findings in the latest issue of the journal Astrobiology, an important step toward devising instruments that could be carried aboard a future Europa orbiter to determine whether life exists there.

"We went back to the field deposits (at Borup Fiord) to see whether evidence of this link between the sulphur on the ice and the presence of the microbes would be detectable," Gleeson told Postmedia News. "We found multiple lines of evidence for microbial activity."

The minute but detectable traces of life at Borup Fiord's sulphur spring suggest similar traces would be "a valuable target for biosignatures at Europa," said Gleeson.

Grasby, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, has described the yellow site at Borup Fiord Pass as "the best analogue we have for what could be going on at Europa" and that every advance in understanding and profiling the geochemistry on Ellesmere Island "can help design a better mission" in the search for life on Jupiter's moon.

Several other sites in the Canadian Arctic also have been studied by scientists searching for ways to detect life in harsh extraterrestrial environments, such as Mars.

The Haughton meteorite crater on Devon Island, north of Baffin Island, has been the site of a long-running Mars-related research project backed by NASA and various Canadian research centres.

And in 2010, a team of Canadian scientists announced they had discovered a species of unique, methane-eating microbes living in a salty spring on Nunavut's Axel Heiberg Island, off the southwest coast of Ellesmere.

That find at Lost Hammer Spring was hailed as proof that similar organisms could have survived in such inhospitable conditions on ancient Mars — and could even be living there today.

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Located 600 million kilometres from Earth and smaller than our planet's moon, Europa has been described by NASA as being "near the top of the short list of places in our solar system that might harbour extraterrestrial life."

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